Why Is Egypt Backing Saudi Arabia Against the Houthis?

Sisi’s Nation’s Future party and its allies could have delivered a two-thirds majority in a single afternoon. The week of delay was a wait for diplomacy. Saudi Arabia was talking to the Houthis through Oman. Egyptian intelligence was trying to open lines to Tehran. On 26 October, the same day as the vote, Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman went to Tehran with Pakistani and Turkish officials from the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, and the meeting ended with a pledge to keep talking, as Silent Dossier reported from the Tehran talks. Israel Hayom reported that the Saudi delegation carried $1 billion intended to buy a halt to the Houthi campaign through Iran.

When the House voted anyway, it was recording that those efforts had failed, or at least that Egypt could not rely on them. The Houthis claimed a new attack on Riyadh’s airport the day before the vote.

Riyadh has made no public request since the vote, and the Saudi foreign ministry has not commented, because there is nothing yet to comment on. The request is a foregone conclusion. Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told CNN this month: “Whatever been asked by the Saudis, of course we will respond,” adding that “any kind of support from Egypt, of course our response will be positive.” Ayman Abdel-Wahab of the state-run Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies said Egypt was acting after “requests from Saudi Arabia as the situation there progressively worsened,” as the Soufan Center quoted him.

A Saudi analyst told the BBC that no Egyptian soldiers would be needed, since the kingdom flies more Patriot PAC-3 interceptors than any country except the United States. He was repeating Sisi’s own line that Egypt’s role is defensive. Saudi air defences are good; they cannot cover every airport, pipeline and plant in a country that size, a problem the Wall Street Journal documented and Silent Dossier examined in detail. Egyptian units filling those gaps would give Saudi commanders cover at home and freedom to act. For a country at war, that is a heavy reinforcement.

Egypt is the only country whose parliament has voted to send its army to defend Saudi Arabia. Egypt is not a member of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, which Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed in August, and it has no joint defence treaty with Riyadh. Turkey’s parliament is still debating. Cairo has already decided, and its decision binds the president, the army and the elected chamber that speaks for the public.

For Saudi Arabia, that is a diplomatic victory: from this point the kingdom is not fighting alone.

Sisi has drawn the limits clearly. Egyptian forces will defend Saudi territory and borders, and Egypt will not attack Yemen. That does not keep Egypt out of the war. When an Egyptian battery shoots down a Houthi drone or ballistic missile, Saudi jets will go after the launcher, and Egypt will be part of the chain that led to the strike. How Egypt sees its own role matters less than how its enemies see it, and the Houthis and Iran will make that judgment for themselves.

They have begun to. Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of the group’s political bureau, said Egypt “declares war against the Republic of Yemen” with the vote, The Times of Israel reported. Before the vote, the Houthi-aligned parliament speaker Yahya al-Rai warned that the path would “pose a grave danger” to Egypt’s national security. A pro-Houthi voice in a widely shared clip went further, threatening that the answer to Egyptian intervention in Yemen would come at Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

Not every Egyptian lawmaker agreed. One deputy told Al-Masry Al-Youm, in remarks The New York Times carried, that he did not vote for the measure because the region would explode and the only winner would be Israel. He stated his view, as a lawmaker should. Parliament heard those fears and voted yes regardless.

The bill started before the vote. Since Sisi said Egypt would stand with Saudi Arabia militarily, the pound has fallen 6 to 7 percent, and Bloomberg data put its slide at 6.4 percent from the start of October to a record low of about 55.3 per dollar on 22 October. The Egyptian stock exchange has fallen about 7 percent as Arab and foreign investors sold shares and treasury bills.

Television economists blame a strong dollar and oil prices. Those pressures exist, but the pound is falling because Egypt said it would support Saudi Arabia, and now that pledge is official policy. Money came into Egypt because investors saw a country outside the war. They now see a country inside it. Every day that Egyptian forces stand in Saudi Arabia without investors knowing whether Egypt will strike the Houthis or be struck by them will cost money. Parliament knew this, as Silent Dossier set out in its account of what Cairo’s pledge is costing it, and voted for Saudi Arabia anyway.

The Soufan Center argued on 26 October that “Egypt is emerging as a central figure in resolving conflicts in Yemen, Sudan, and Gaza,” after years at the edge of regional strategy. The vote is the latest step in a policy that has been building under Sisi. In Gaza, Cairo hosted the Sharm el-Sheikh summit and blocked the displacement of Palestinians into Sinai. In Sudan, Egyptian support has given the Sudanese army the edge over the Rapid Support Forces. In Libya, Cairo drew a red line that kept Khalifa Haftar’s forces from collapsing under Turkish-backed pressure. During the Iran war, Egyptian intelligence carried messages between Tehran and Washington.

Almost all of that was done quietly. This time Egypt has stepped out from behind the curtain and taken a public military position. The policy has moved by stages: marginal roles, then secret roles, then roles whose results were visible, and now open military support, the most dangerous kind. Cairo has done it without closing its channels to Iran or to the Houthis. Iran’s foreign minister telephoned Abdelatty during the debate, the Soufan Center noted.

This decision is bigger than Egypt’s deployment to the 1991 Gulf War. Then, Egyptian troops went to Saudi Arabia under a UN Security Council mandate, alongside Syrian forces and a US ground army. Now Egypt goes without a Security Council resolution, and Washington has turned down Saudi requests for direct intervention. Egypt is going in alone.

It is also going while still committed elsewhere. The Egyptian Rafale detachment sent to defend Emirati airspace, which Sisi inspected with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed in May, according to Janes, has not come home. In the UAE, Egypt’s job was air defence. In Saudi Arabia, a country fighting on three fronts, the most dangerous of them from Iraq, it is a mission on the ground.

The outcome of this war will shape Egypt’s relations with the Gulf for decades. Saudi Arabia does not need to test Egypt any longer: it has tested it. On the day the kingdom needed help, it found Egypt, and that counts for more in Riyadh than the word of the United States or of treaty partners such as Turkey and Pakistan. After this, Saudi Arabia cannot look at Egypt with suspicion, and any future political dispute will be settled against a deep store of goodwill. Even if no Egyptian soldier ever deploys, the vote has made the point: the Egyptian people, through their parliament, stand with Saudi Arabia.

Sisi has said that Saudi national security is part of Egypt’s national security, and he means it literally. About 1.5 million Egyptians live in Saudi Arabia, the largest Egyptian community abroad, and they send home between $8 billion and $13 billion a year. If Saudi Arabia is destabilised, fails to secure its borders or fails to defeat the Houthis, Egypt’s economy pays.

In September 1962, army officers overthrew Imam Muhammad al-Badr in North Yemen and declared a republic. President Gamal Abdel Nasser sent Egyptian troops to defend it, while Saudi Arabia backed the royalist tribes fighting to restore the imam. The deployment grew to about 50,000 soldiers, the Soufan Center notes, and some estimates put the peak higher still. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers were killed in five years of mountain warfare against an enemy that knew the ground. The war also drained the treasury, including much of the gold that backed the Egyptian pound. After the defeat of June 1967, Nasser and King Faisal agreed at the Khartoum summit that Egypt would withdraw, and the last Egyptian troops left Yemen that December.

Israeli commentators have called Yemen “Egypt’s Vietnam”, and the Soufan Center writes that the deployment “weakened Egypt’s army and contributed to Cairo’s defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.” Today Egypt goes in with a weaker economy than it had in the 1960s, and this time on the Saudi side. Egypt has not declared war on the Houthis, but what happens next depends on how the Houthis read Egypt’s role, not on how Cairo describes it.